Human-Robot Assembly: Methodical Design and Assessment of an Immersive Virtual Environment for Real-World Significance

Virtual reality is a powerful tool for industrial applications. The article at hand addresses designers of industrial virtual environments. It summarizes key aspects to design immersive and coherent virtual environments. Furthermore, relevant influencing factors for a high quality virtual environment and tools to quantify this quality are presented. So far, a methodology to design, evaluate, and transfer knowledge from virtual environments into reality has been missing and is of high value for industrial applications. The proposed methodical approach includes the steps application analysis, technology selection and integration, design of virtual environment, evaluation of simulator quality, as well as discussion of the real-world validity. The method is shown on the example of a virtual human-robot working cell used to analyze the human perception of robot behavior during mutual assembly processes. The quality of the virtual environment is evaluated to be adequate for those purposes and the transfer of knowledge gained in virtuality on a corresponding real-world application is discussed. To the best of our knowing a system like the presented one, including full-body tracking, finger tracking, a virtual avatar and a head-mounted display has not been used for industrial use cases and human-robot cooperation before.